Since a man named Ellwood Ivins cold-drew - the process still used today - the first steel tube in America in 1886, the industry has flourished.
Consider the uses for the ubiquitous tube. Hypodermic needles. Hex nuts. Shopping cart handles. Jungle gyms. Railings in cafeterias and on hospital beds. Oil, gas and water pipes. Struts for airplane landing gear. Tail pipes. Gear shift levers. Turn signals. Bicycle frames. Lawn furniture. The list goes on and on.
"When you talk tube and pipe, you're talking about a range from a very small diameter tube like you would find in a syringe all the way to a 10-foot diameter culvert made out of corrugated steel," said Nancy Olson, information specialist for the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, International, in Rockford, Ill., a metals trade organization.
"It's the unnoticed industry that you can't do without," said Douglass
Yadon, publisher of the Preston Pipe Report in Tulsa, Okla., which tracks tube industry activity.
Pennsylvania's 24 tube manufacturers registered $720.5 million in total shipments and employed 3,300 persons according to 1987 figures. Only Ohio has more tube makers, with 27.
Montgomery County is home to the greatest concentration of specialty and small diameter tubing companies in the nation, Yadon believes.
There are Superior Tube Co., in Collegeville; Handy & Harman Inc., in Norristown; Precision Tube in North Wales; Plymouth Tube in Horsham; Accumetrics in Royersford, and Tube Methods in Bridgeport. Just across the county line is Judson Smith Co. in Boyertown.
Bishop Tube, located in Frazer, is bankrupt, according to plant engineer Russell Levering, but he added that it was recently purchased by the Marcegaglia Group of Italy.
Allied Tube & Conduit, at Red Lion Road and Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia, not far from Montgomery County, is the world's largest producer of conduit - the pipe that a building's electrical wires run through,
Yadon said.
